Part 18: Operation Secret Rage
Operation Secret Rage
Today's mission is another council mission, kidnapping a Dark VIP. These spooky people are of important to ADVENT for some reason and stealing them will net XCom a lot of supplies and Intel. Alternatively you can just kill them and get the hell out of Dodge if you want to. These missions can be easier or harder depending on the layout of things. In this particular mission the building the VIP was in and the lay out of the buildings entrance and exit points was not particularly kind to me. In these situations every turn can count, even the boring turns where all you do is advance. Advancing at a half move and over watching is the safe play, but sometimes the safe play takes too long and you need to be dashing to cover the ground to get tot he VIP or evac point. It can be a real balancing act of speed vs risk, but some things can help make the choices a lot safer. This would have been a good mission for scanning protocol or the scanning beacons. Knowing whats ahead of you in the next turn or two can be a huge benefit in times like this.
The Snake King returned! I'm sure anyone that hasn't playing saw it coming anyway with our incredibly unsubtle hinting at it over the last three videos but yeah, they can just pop up and add to a mission. This can happen at some really unfortunate times like while you're busy already with a pod of other aliens or on missions where you have a strict time limit. Where and when you run into a ruler again is random and can be fortuitous (If you catch them by themselves on a mission with out a time limit) or disastrous. For what ever reasons I had at the time I let the Snake King show off one of his most troubling abilities, his ice spit. It's just like the frost bomb and can freeze your soldiers for 2 turns. Letting him hit multiple people with it can be ruinous. Thankfully rulers do not heal between encounters so the damage dealt to them in one fight is not recovered before the next fight. Meaning while not ideal, if a ruler is wrecking your team it is possible to kill them by a kind of attrition; battling the ruler until you risk lives, evacing and living to fight it again another time. Obviously this means the potential for failing missions, but at least it means they aren't a permanent roadblock that you'll be slamming into again and again.
As we also made unsubtle hints that there are three rulers, which was pretty obvious by the three tanks and holo displays back at Vahlen's creepy fun time snake summer camp cave. There will be no lead in to the next one appearing either. One day I will be out on a mission minding my own business and then something huge and unexpected is going to show up and ruin my day. This is unavoidable, aside from never investigating the happy fun time snake cave in the first place. So this DLC can be a big miss to some people. The rulers are hard and have their own unique game changing mechanics to deal with, which can be kind of bullshit, and they appear at absolute random to fuck up your day. However killing each of them lets you research and build a unique item from each of the rulers so there are some pretty sweet rewards for dealing with them. It's up to each player to really decide if they want to go through the DLC or not and I can totally understand those that dislike the Alien Hunters DLC.